Mr. Speaker, I will just get to the nub of the question as to what I and the New Democratic Party would propose to do about the obscene level of child poverty in the country. We ought to be very careful that we do not come to simplistic conclusions about what it is that plunges people into poverty.
Let us go directly to the heart of the matter. We have a government that prides itself and congratulates itself on, and did so again in the throne speech yesterday, the introduction of the child tax credit, yet the government knows that because of its own policies two-thirds of the children living in grinding poverty in this country do not receive one red cent of benefit from the child tax benefit program. That is perverse. It is unbelievable that the government says that we will claw back from the poorest of the poor in this country, literally two-thirds of the families living in poverty, the child tax benefit.
The government has said that it wants to increase it. Let me say very clearly to the questioner who has raised this question of what needs to be done that at the very minimum what this government needs to do, if it is serious about moving toward the 1989 resolution to eliminate child poverty in this country, is double the existing child tax credit. Anything less than that is not going to lift our children out of poverty and is going to be part of a very ugly, shameful legacy indeed.